Even though I am far from being a computer linguist, I can see the need for Perl 6. If Perl 5 was syntactily as pretty as Python for doing OO programming, I wouldn't be building a event driven application using Python (and having to learn Pythons's very wierd excentricities most of which come from it's lack of value assignment.). I have written tens of thousands of lines of OO-perl5, but am embarassed to pass off maintenance of this code to a non-Perl programmer.

Perl 6 syntax is far more elegant. This is important. It may be fun to write obfusticated code, but applications that require maintenance should be easy to follow. (No, I'm not a COBOL programmer ;-) I mean, easy to follow by another programmer.. who may actually be me looking at my own code two years from now after having done a dozen other projects in between. H___, I have trouble recognizing my own English text as written by me, years later.

Perlhaps, if and when Perl6 is developed and released, it will be called something other than Perl! Stranger things have happened.